Facebook colonization of the world progress report

Social network continues its conquest of the planet, taking over Brazil from Google in the last year, according to Vincenzo Cosenza's World Map of Social Networks. China and Russia remain the major populations resisting Facebook.

Facebook continues its conquest of the planet, taking over Brazil from Google in the last year, according Vincenzo Cosenza's World Map of Social Networks, which shows the most popular social networking sites by country using data from Google Trends and Alexa. At this juncture, Facebook has signed up nearly half of the more than 2 billion Internet users worldwide.

V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki are keeping Facebook at bay in countries of the former Soviet Union, and QZone, Tencent Weibo and e Sina Weibo dominate China's social networkers. Cloob, the Persian-language social networking site is dominant in Iran. In the last year, according to Cosenza's calculations, Facebook has brought Brazil into the fold (see the map below), with an estimated 20 percent to 30 percent penetration rate of Internet users in the country.

In its SEC filing, Facebook stated that its goal is to connect all global Internet users:

There are more than two billion global Internet users, according to an industry source, and we aim to connect all of them. We have achieved varying levels of penetration within the population of Internet users in different countries For example, in countries such as Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela we estimate that we have penetration rates of greater than 80% of Internet users; in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 60%; in countries such as Brazil, Germany, and India we estimate that we have penetration rates of approximately 20-30%; in countries such as Japan, Russia, and South Korea we estimate that we have penetration rates of less than 15%; and in China, where Facebook access is restricted, we have near 0% penetration.

We continue to invest in growing our user base, particularly in markets where we are relatively less penetrated. We expect MAU growth will benefit from increases in worldwide Internet users, in particular as a result of increasing broadband penetration and usage of mobile devices in developing markets. Growth in MAUs depends on our ability to retain our current users, re-engage with inactive users, and add new users, including by extending our reach across mobile platforms.

Vincenzo Cosenza

Cosenza's social-networking map from June 2009 indicates how Facebook has grown, and social networks such as Orkut, Hi5 and Friendster have faded away.